Very interesting

[GH85Carrera]

I was watching the Top Gear special on "the cars of the people" last night.

James May was driving the 6th prototype VW bug. It is the oldest driving VW around. It is a KDF Wagon. It was not built at the VW plant.



It is interesting to me that all of those pre production bugs were really Porsches!

So the 365 was not based on the VW, the VW was based on a Porsche!

I always knew Dr. Porsche was the designer, I just did not know he built the car with his name on it.

Catch the re-runs. It is an interesting show.

[911SauCy]

Verryyy Interesting fact to share with all the "nay-sayers"

[DaveE]

I loved driving the Beetle I had. Small, nimble, like some other of my favorite cars.

[rcooled]

Yes, this was an interesting show. I was surprised to learn that the car itself was only a small part of a much larger entity. One of the KdF's projects was to provide low-cost transportation for the masses, and what eventually became known as the Volkswagen was the result of that effort.


From Wiki:

Kraft durch Freude (German for Strength through Joy, abbreviated KdF) was a large state-controlled leisure organization in Nazi Germany. It was a part of the German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF), the national German labour organization at that time. Set up as a tool to promote the advantages of National Socialism to the people, it soon became the world's largest tourism operator of the 1930s.
KdF was supposed to bridge the class divide by making middle-class leisure activities available to the masses. This was underscored by having cruises with passengers of mixed classes and having them, regardless of social status, draw lots for allocation of cabins.
Another less ideological goal was to boost the German economy by stimulating the tourist industry out of its slump from the 1920s. It was quite successful up until the outbreak of World War II. By 1934, over two million Germans had participated on a KdF trip; by 1939 the reported numbers lay around 25 million people. The organization essentially collapsed in 1939, and several projects, such as the massive Prora holiday resort, were never completed.